Read more about how we’re thinking and where we’re investing here.
Recent Posts
Entrepreneurship
The ability to make fast decisions often means the difference between good and great – this is true for both entrepreneurs and investors. At Version One, we usually know within a few days whether we should invest in a company or not. After we get this initial feeling, we can spend weeks doing more due […]
Entrepreneurship, Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
It’s typically a binary outcome for marketplace start-ups at the beginning: either you figure out the chicken-and-egg problem or you don’t. But, marketplaces can face a binary outcome at the other end too: either you scale your marketplace into a large, stand-alone company that can go public, or you find yourself with few other exit […]
Entrepreneurship
Debt funding is an interesting option for start-ups in two scenarios: you can increase your funding base while times are good in order to maximize growth or you can use it stretch your runway when equity raises are tougher (or you don’t want to price your equity). But as the equity funding market is cooling […]
Entrepreneurship
Just a few years ago, if you wanted to do something big, you needed to go to Silicon Valley. It meant frequent flights or moving your company to San Francisco to raise money from Bay Area VCs. Times are changing, and these geographical barriers are beginning to break down. Waterloo has another unicorn with Kik. […]
Entrepreneurship
Running a start-up is profoundly different than running a big company. When you’re small, founders are close to the action and can make sure all the important things happen. But as a start-up scales, founders can’t have their hands in everything: many companies lose focus on the customer; decisions get bogged down; and there are […]
Entrepreneurship, Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
Six months ago, we published A Guide to Marketplaces. Marketplace companies comprise an important part of our portfolio and investment thesis and we recognized the shortage of content out there specifically geared toward marketplace startups. We compiled a lot of the insights we learned from working with great marketplace companies and wrote a handbook. It […]
Entrepreneurship
Amazon’s Annual Letter to Shareholders has become a must-read for entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders – and the recent 2015 letter provides great insights into how Jeff Bezos thinks and how one of the most successful companies on Earth operates (this year, Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales). […]
Entrepreneurship
The average 25-year-old has already worked 6.3 jobs, and will have 12-15 jobs before their working career is finished. The portrait of the job-hopping millennial is a stark difference to Gen X and Boomer workers who may have stayed with the same job and employer for decades. Another study found that millennials have almost twice as […]
Portfolio
In the past, we typically wait until the end of the year to recap what’s happened here at V1. But with a group of incredible startups doing great things, we’re determined to provide more frequent updates. If you’re not already familiar with the startups and founders making up the V1 portfolio, here’s a summary of […]
Entrepreneurship
One of the biggest challenges for first-time founders with little work experience is that they don’t always know what “great” looks like in every area required to build and run a successful business. Understanding “great” is one of the single most important levers to push your team to greatness, hire the best people possible for […]
Entrepreneurship
We have all seen Jeff Bezos’ great quote on being stubbornly flexible at Amazon: “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t […]
Entrepreneurship
Over the past few years, self-driving cars have received a lot of attention and the buzz has intensified this month with the announcement that GM plans to acquire San Francisco startup Cruise Automation for reportedly more than $1 billion. When people talk about self-driving cars, the discussion typically centers around a few important topics: 1) […]
Data / AI / ML
When DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated South Korean master Lee Se-dol, it was a historic stride for AI. The depth of this development, coupled with higher computing power and cheaper data storage, is moving AI into the mainstream. Perhaps the most popular application of AI today comes in the form of virtual assistants and bots, or “agents” […]
Entrepreneurship
Chris Dixon wrote a great post discussing what’s next in the computing industry. Historically, there’s been a major new tech cycle every 10 to 15 years that brings along a new era of computing: we saw this with personal computers in the 80s, the Internet in the 90s, and now with the smartphone era. If […]
Entrepreneurship
Last week I attended the NFX demo day. For me, it is one of the most fun demo days to attend as NFX, like Version One, focuses on network effect businesses, particularly marketplaces and social platforms. During the day, NFX partners shared their insights from having worked with dozens of businesses over the first 2 […]
Data / AI / ML, Entrepreneurship
Last week I wrote about how the next wave of enterprise apps will stand out in two ways: they’ll be smart and make experiences as effortless as possible for the end user. As machine learning and predictive modelling become more of a mainstream reality, apps will shift from being reactive “sense and respond” to more […]
Entrepreneurship
We’ve all talked about the consumerization of enterprise apps for several years. Yet while it’s been a popular trend, there still aren’t many enterprise apps out there that can rival the user experience of the best consumer ones. Most enterprise apps are still plagued with clunky, form-driven interfaces; require too much data entry from the […]
Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
Over the years, we have invested in almost every category out there: from ad tech and content, to gaming, hardware, marketplaces, e-commerce, and SaaS. We’re constantly revisiting the types of businesses we should be investing in and refining our investment thesis driven by three key questions: Which markets/business types do we understand the best? Where can […]
Portfolio
Last year, we quietly invested in the seed round of Booster Fuels, a then-stealth on-demand gas delivery service. Today, we’re excited to officially announce our investment as they raise their Series A financing from Maveron, Madrona, and RRE, and other invests, as well as expand into Silicon Valley. Much has been written about the Uberification of the economy […]
Entrepreneurship
When’s the last time you sent out or requested a CV? Chances are it was quite awhile ago. In today’s reputation economy, we evaluate one another based on what people have done and how we’re connected. What you’ve built is becoming more important than where you’ve worked and the school you attended. If you’re a […]